The Red Phone in Black and White

THE RED PHONE IN BLACK AND WHITE
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Orlando Patterson, Harvard University]
[Commentary] Watching Hillary Clinton’s recent “It’s 3 a.m.” advertisement, Patterson is reminded of D. W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation,” the racist movie epic that helped revive the Ku Klux Klan, with its portrayal of black men lurking in the bushes around white society. The danger implicit in the phone ad — as I see it — is that the person answering the phone might be a black man, someone who could not be trusted to protect us from this threat. The message: our loved ones are in grave danger and only Mrs. Clinton can save them. An Obama presidency would be dangerous — and not just because of his lack of experience. In my reading, the ad, in the insidious language of symbolism, says that Mr. Obama is himself the danger, the outsider within.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/11/opinion/11patterson.html?ref=todayspap...
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